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Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Activision Blizzard Publishing, celebrated an “Olympics” of StarCraft II elite pro gamers at Battle.net World Championship (BWC) in Shanghai, China at the end of 2012, just months after Riot Games concluded its second season of its global League of Legends competition in Los Angeles.

StarCraft II and League of Legends have both helped propel eSports to the next level of awareness around the world. While there are avid fans who watch live streams of their favorite players in actual competitions, as well as practicing at home; there have been rivalries that have developed like you see with fans of traditional sports. I routine will get comments from fans of these two games whenever I write a story on the other game.

Inside the companies, they respect what the other is doing and don’t see a rivalry at all. Dustin Browder, lead game director on StarCraft II at Blizzard Entertainment, focuses on the future of eSports and explains why both game franchises are good for eSports in this exclusive interview.

What was it like going to Shanghai for the Battle.net World Championship?

It was absolutely amazing to be able to gather together with thousands of our fans to watch these incredible players throw down in this huge tournament. It was almost eight months that we put together this tournament, pulling in players from all over the world to see who was the best of the best in Shanghai. It was a huge thrill to be there.

How did the Battle.net World Championship come about?

This was an idea that we had for a while to try to put together an experience that would allow a lot of our players in a lot of countries all over the world and bring together an Olympics of StarCraft. We got players from countries that already have a very competitive eSports scene like Korea, North America and lots of places in Western Europe. These people already have this very competitive scene, so we got a lot of great players. But we also wanted to get the opportunity for some players who maybe didn’t have that super competitive eSports scene yet like South America, Central America and some parts of Eastern Europe and Asia and give them a chance to send some champions to come to a central place and have a really big battle to see who is the best.

Why did you pick Shanghai for this global event over other cities?

For Blizzard we get the chance to have a few events every so often. We had a tournament for StarCraft in Korea in 2007 and we have BlizzCon every year in Irvine. Every time we have one of these events we look for an opportunity to go somewhere in the world where we haven’t been in a while and try to connect with our fans in that location. We hadn’t been to China in quite a while. This was the single largest gathering of Blizzard fans anywhere in the world. We thought it’d be really cool to have this event there and commune with those fans.

How does the popularity of eSports in China compare to Korea?

It’s really huge and we see that at BWC. We saw a lot of fans come out for the local Chinese players and we saw tons and tons of fans come to the event. Honestly, at this point I won’t even say eSports is just huge in Korea. ESports is big in China, it’s big in North America, it’s big in Europe, it’s big in Korea. We’ve seen this be happen with Brood War. That was predominantly a Korean experience that was exported all over the world, and now we’re seeing the Koreas still have some of the absolute best players. But at the same time, the number of tournaments, the types of tournaments, the number of fans who are tuning in has grown substantially in almost every country all over the world. It’s not just a Korean phenomenon.

What do you think about the rivalry between StarCraft II and League of Legends?

I think both games are great games. I don’t think there’s much of a rivalry. They’re very different games at the end of the day. I know our fans in some cases will make a rivalry out of it, but we don’t really see it that way. They have a very different game. They’re doing good work with it. We have a very different game. We think we’re doing really good work with our game and there’s plenty of room for everybody here to make some really great products and help grow eSports.

What did you think about the League of Legends Finals at USC this year?

I actually didn’t see the finals at USC for Riot. I know I need to catch up on that, but we’re working really hard on Heart of the Swarm.

What impact do you see Heart of the Swarm having on StarCraft II and eSports?

We have a ton of new features we’re putting into Heart of the Swarm for eSports and we’re really hopeful these features will help grow the product. We’re doing things like allowing commentators to make their own custom UI for observing games. And we’re doing things like resume from replay, which is a feature we’ve got that allows you to take a replay of any game or even a partially completed game and resume that game from any point you want in the middle of that game. So that means if there’s a brownout, if there’s a network failure, if there’s a blue screen, if a keyboard breaks, you can reload that game from any moment in that game to continue it. It gives us a lot of flexibility to deal with a lot of real world problems that come up with live events.

Tournaments like BWC occur in a very difficult, challenging environment and it’s hard to create the perfect system that never has any problems, so this gives us an out. This gives us a way to get that game started again no matter what happens. Obviously, we’re doing everything we can for the product in terms of better social experiences, new ways to train the users who may be interested in playing a little bit more professionally, but haven’t had a chance to get into StarCraft. We’re doing lots of features across the whole game to try to make it a better, stronger eSports experience, but also more accessible experience for new users.